Bankers and bullies Like an alcoholic downing nips on the drive home from court-ordered rehabilitation, JPMorgan Chase and its CEO, Jamie Dimon, could hardly wait to once again start wildly tossing depositors' money into derivative hedge bets — the very type of irresponsible behavior that nearly brought down all of Wall Street less than four years ago.

How the Senator screwed college students. Plus, Obama and gay marriage. Republican Senator Scott Brown's vote to allow the interest on college loans to double illustrates perfectly why Brown is a clever politician, but a rotten senator.

Plus, arts funding on Beacon Hill Former US senator and Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards is on trial for violating campaign finance laws. If convicted, Edwards could spend the next 30 years in a federal prison.

Ready, aim Mitt Romney, in what his own staff called the first major speech of the general election, received a standing ovation last week at the National Rifle Association (NRA) annual convention in St. Louis.

Naked justice The recent US Supreme Court ruling allowing for suspects of even the most minor, nonviolent crimes to be strip-searched is — on a political level — outrageous, and on a personal level it is twisted and smarmy. Quite literally, it perverts an already sick justice system.

The senator joins the Republican cult against birth control When Massachusetts junior senator Scott Brown last week signed on to support a Republican initiative to nullify President Barack Obama's birth-control compromise, Brown joined the vast and growing right-wing war on women.

Plus, Deval Patrick By any measure, President Barack Obama's State of the Union speech would have been considered a political winner, but coming just one day after the Republicans' constipated Florida-primary debate, Obama scored an undeniable triumph.

The fight for lasting internet freedom — and security — has only just begun You can almost breathe a sigh of relief, though the fight is long from over. As of this writing, it looks increasingly as if Congress will — miraculously — fail to break the Internet.

A bad pitch Despite evidence that "three strikes" mandatory sentencing laws don't work, are punishingly expensive for taxpayers, and make an already unfair criminal-justice system even more irrational and racist, the Massachusetts legislature seems hell-bent on enacting one.